About TNW

TNW Sites

Forced to use IE6? Blow the whistle on your boss

It’s no great secret that IE6 needs to be consigned to history. Its incompatibility with many modern web technologies forces web designers to waste time building contrived work-arounds and alternative code to accomodate people who won’t upgrade.

A growing movement is building in the web tech world that aims to stamp out IE6 completely. IE6 No More is a campaign that already has big web names like Posterous, Reddit, Justin.tv and Disqus on board, pledging to encourage IE6 users to upgrade.

That’s fine for dealing with individual users, but the main problem with IE6 is the large number of businesses who have invested in custom web apps that only work with IE6. They won’t upgrade because it would simply cost too much to rewrite the apps they already use. Consider just one multinational corporation sticking to IE6 – that’s thousands of users who have no choice but to continue using the browser.

Now IE6 Offenders has launched, allowing disgruntled IE6-using employees to blow the whistle on their bosses. The site allows you to report an offending company, search the database of offenders and view a chart of the biggest IE6 users. The United States Postal Service is currently at number one with 785,929 employees. That may be a little unfair though as they may not all be using IE6. When was the last time you saw a postman browsing the web on his rounds?

The site is mainly designed for web designers to vent a little steam but it’s an admirable endeavour though. Hopefully it will highlight the problem to the CEOs of some of the big names like Nestlé and Ford who are listed on the site. The site’s manifesto states:

“We believe most IT staff wants (sic) to do the right thing, but can’t because of budget, manpower or corporate red tape. We’re not here to vilify these poor folks. We’d just like to bring light to the magnitude of the issue, and perhaps put a little pressure on the largest of offenders.”